oslo_triennale

Markus Schaefer has been nominated as the head of the jury for an idea competition in Oslo held on the occasion of the Oslo Triennale. The competition “MAN MADE REFORMULATE” looks at how can architecture solve the challenges of tomorrow. “The intention of the competition is to challenge the participants on how to exemplify and illustrate policies on architecture, the relationship between architecture and politics, and how architecture can contribute in solving the challenges of the future.”

Analyzing the competition entries let to the diagram above and the following thoughts:
“Architecture is a discipline currently undergoing a “reformulation” as the ambition of architects increasingly does not match the tools at their disposal. This in turn is due to the widening gulf between formal processes of generating architecture which are increasingly the realm of large scale financial interests and informal processes where architects search the alliance with other disciplines and experiment with new ways of being relevant. In focusing on the utopian in architecture, the competition cast these two opposing tendencies in stark relief.
In addition, the diagram shows how architecture reflects current topics and how these topics change over time. While social housing and public space were once on top of the list, now also topics such as urban art, energy or even urban agriculture are becoming important. Interestingly enough, fields such as new media or theory which were relevant up to a couple of years ago are less talked about today.
So in addition to the fundamental paradigm shift in the relevance of the “project” as compared to the “intervention”, there is the phenomenon of trends in architecture which change over time. Wether these new topics can become core competences of architects and can become relevant and operative beyond the architectural “scene” remains to be seen.”